Meanwhile There Are Letters

by Suzanne Marrs

  26 Eudora had been in Ohio for a speaking engagement at Denison College.

  27 “The Blessed Damozel” is Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poem inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” The first stanza of Rossetti’s poem is:

  The blessed damozel leaned out

  From the gold bar of Heaven;

  Her eyes were deeper than the depth

  Of waters stilled at even;

  She had three lilies in her hand,

  And the stars in her hair were seven.

  28 Ken’s lecture was published as “Down These Streets a Mean Man Must Go” in the Spring/Summer 1977 issue of Antaeus. Daniel Halpern (1945–) is an editor, publishing executive, professor, and poet.

  29 Ken has been reading Albert Borowitz’s book Innocence and Arsenic: Studies in Crime and Literature (New York: HarperCollins, 1977) and Donald Davie’s 1976 Clark Lectures at Cambridge University (A Gathered Church: The Literature of the English Dissenting Interest, 1700–1930 [Oxford University Press, 1978]). Davie (1922–1995) was a poet and critic associated with the English Movement.

  Chapter Seven

  1 Welty to Aswell, [January 20, 1977], Eudora Welty Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

  2 This was a startling opinion to be expressed by Ken, who had always felt marriage was a bedrock of civilization. In the 1960s, he had broken with one lifelong friend who left his wife for another woman.

  3 Eudora reviewed Selected Letters of William Faulkner, edited by Joseph Blotner, for the February 6, 1977, New York Times Book Review. This review appears in The Eye of the Story.

  4 Margaret Millar’s novel Ask for Me Tomorrow.

  5 Harker’s second novel Turn Again Home was published in 1977.

  6 Joan Fleming (1908–1980) was a British writer, who twice won the Gold Dagger Award from the Crime Writers Association.

  7 James McConkey (1922–), emeritus professor at Cornell University, is a novelist and literary critic with books on Forster and Chekhov.

  8 Eudora was traveling in order to receive honorary degrees from Washington University, Kent State University, and Harvard University.

  9 Laidlaw is the first in a series of three Glasgow-based mysteries by Scottish novelist William McIlvanney (1936–).

  10 The destructive La Mesa fire began on June 16, 1977, and was not contained until a week later.

  11 This might as aptly serve as title for a book or essay by or about Ross Macdonald, in whose private-eye stories ocular imagery and information are omnipresent.

  12 The Millars’ previous home, which featured in Margaret’s book The Birds and the Beasts Were There and which Ken successfully defended from burning embers during the 1964 Coyote fire, was destroyed during this Sycamore Canyon fire in July 1977.

  13 Frank Lyell’s PhD thesis was actually done at Princeton University. John Galt (1779–1839) was a Scottish novelist and the first novelist to deal with the issues of the Industrial Revolution.

  14 Eudora reviewed Katherine Anne Porter’s book The Never-Ending Wrong in the August 21, 1977, New York Times Book Review.

  15 Eudora, who in 1952 had reviewed Charlotte’s Web, reviewed Essays of E. B. White in the September 25, 1977, New York Times Book Review. She included the earlier review in The Eye of the Story.

  16 Zackel’s novel, Cocaine and Blue Eyes, represented by Ken’s agent Dorothy Olding, was published in 1978. It was eventually made into a film starring O. J. Simpson.

  17 Millar Papers, University of California, Irvine, Special Collections and Archives.

  18 This collection had just been published in New York by the Mysterious Press. Otto Penzler, owner of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, had founded the press in 1975.

  19 The University of Mississippi hosted a Eudora Welty Symposium that drew 800 people from thirty-two states and three foreign countries to Oxford. Cleanth Brooks, William Jay Smith, and Reynolds were on the program, as was Eudora, who read from Losing Battles. Ken’s introduction to Lew Archer, Private Investigator was published as “The Private Detective” in the New York Times Book Review, October 23, 1977.

  20 This exhibition at the old Capitol Museum in Jackson, Mississippi, was prepared by museum director and Welty friend Patti Carr Black. The catalogue for the exhibit is titled Welty.

  21 Ken’s introduction to Lew Archer, Private Investigator was published as “The Private Detective” in the New York Times Book Review, October 23, 1977.

  22 Kenneth Millar to W. H. Ferry, November 28, 1977, and December 12, 1977, typed copies, University of California, Irvine, Special Collections and Archives.

  Chapter Eight

  1 The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Frenchman Gaston Leroux was published in 1908 and is one of the first locked-room mysteries. Armadale is an 1866 mystery by British writer Wilkie Collins.

  2 Eudora’s story “Acrobats in a Park” dates from 1934.

  3 “Who he?” was a manuscript query famously associated with the New Yorker’s original editor Harold Ross.

  4 Ring Lardner Jr. (1915–2000) was an American journalist and screenwriter who won the 1942 Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Following World War II, Lardner was one of the “Hollywood Ten” investigated by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and found in contempt of Congress. He was then blacklisted in Hollywood.

  5 Ken refers to a picture next to Louis D. Rubin Jr.’s review of The Eye of the Story in the April 22, 1978, New Republic. Rubin (1923–2013), who would be known as the dean of southern literary historians, had long written about Eudora’s fiction.

  6 Barbara Bader’s article about Don Freeman appeared in the April 30, 1978, New York Times Book Review under the title “Child of the Theater, Artist to Children; Theater.”

  7 Eudora’s friend Jane Reid Petty had a beach house on Santa Rosa Island; Patti Carr Black, Charlotte Capers, Ann Morrison, Reynolds, and Eudora had joined Jane for a visit there. Ken had met all of these friends when he came to Jackson in 1973.

  8 M. R. James (1862–1936) was a medieval scholar, provost of Kings College, Cambridge, and later provost of Eton College. He was also the author of ghost stories. In her letter, Eudora misnamed one of those stories. Its actual title was “Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”; the change of “My Lad” to “My Love” seems almost symbolic.

  9 Ralph Sipper’s review appeared in the San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle, April 23, 1978.

  10 Victoria Glendinning, “Eudora Welty in Type and Person,” New York Times Book Review, May 7, 1978, 7.

  11 Murray Horrowitz, one of the creators of Ain’t Misbehavin’, saw a ‘strong and beautiful’ line of connection between his show and Eudora’s 1941 short story “Powerhouse,” a story which itself had been inspired by Waller (Horowitz to Eudora Welty, October 22, 1988, Eudora Welty Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History). Deathtrap, a play by Ira Levin, was made into a feature film in 1982.

  12 Eudora reviewed V. S. Pritchett’s Selected Stories in the New York Times Book Review of June 25, 1978.

  13 Ken’s novel The Goodbye Look had been published in 1969.

  14 On June 13, 1978, Charles Schultz introduced the character “Eudora” into his comic strip “Peanuts” where she would remain until June 13, 1987. Her appearance was distinctive—long, straight black hair, typically topped by knitted cap.

  15 Schultz, a Santa Barbara resident, no doubt encountered Eudora at the Writers Conference in which he too took part. In 1983, the year Ken Millar died, Schultz would have his character Lucy make a reference to Ross Macdonald.

  16 Eudora was still at work on “The Shadow Club,” which she would never complete or publish.

  17 Nona Balakian’s book Critical Encounters: Literary Views and Reviews, 1953–1977 was published by Bobbs-Merrill in 1978.

  18 Ken refers to the meetings between US President Jimmy Carter, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin that led to the Camp David Accords.

  19 Eudora never reviewed S
leeping Beauty, which was dedicated to her, but her review of The Underground Man is included in The Eye of the Story, which she dedicated to Kenneth Millar. This slip on Ken’s part seems especially alarming.

  Chapter Nine

  1 Eudora Welty, “The Shadow Club” papers, Box 268, Folder 5, Piece 2 and Folder 3, Piece 4. Eudora Welty Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

  2 Strange, too, that Ken doesn’t make overt reference to similarities between these real-life events and the plot of his 1976 novel, which involves a painting apparently stolen by a museum guard, alleged forgeries, and an artist father.

  3 Patrick Quentin and Q. Patrick were pen names used by Hugh Callingham Wheeler (1912–1987) and collaborators in writing mystery fiction. His collaborator on novels in 1933 and 1935 was Mary Lou Aswell, who would later become Eudora’s good friend. Wheeler wrote the book for Sweeney Todd, with music by Stephen Sondheim.

  4 Ida M’Toy was published by the University of Illinois Press in May 1979. The essay had previously appeared in 1942 in Accent, a periodical published by the Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing Department at the University of Illinois from 1940 to 1960.

  5 Millar to Green, September 3, 1979, quoted by Green in “A Tribute,” Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1983.

  6 Eudora’s essay “Looking Back at the First Story” was published in the Georgia Review 33 (Winter 1979). Besides writing this essay in the fall of 1978, Eudora had attempted to review the Ecco Press reissue of Elizabeth Bowen’s Bowen’s Court, but she never completed the review. A draft of it is held by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in its Welty Collection.

  7 Fidel Castro spoke at the United Nations in October 1979; author Robert Baudin was thought to be buzzing the United Nations in a single-engine plane. In fact, however, he was buzzing Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, in an effort to publicize his book Confessions of a Promiscuous Counterfeiter. Baudin felt that the publisher had done an inadequate job of publicity.

  8 On October 16, 1979, Ken had inscribed this copy of Archer in Jeopardy: “To Eudora with triple love and affection, as ever, Ken.”

  9 Herb Yellin’s Lord John Press published A Collection of Reviews by Ross Macdonald in 1979.

  10 Ross Macdonald’s review of A Catalogue of Crime, by Jacques Barzun and Wendell H. Taylor (originally published in the New York Times Book Review of April 25, 1971), chided the co-authors’ narrow, outdated definition and discussion of crime fiction. Canadian author Stephen Leacock (1869–1944) wrote several popular volumes of satirical short stories, essays and memoir, which influenced such writers as Robert Benchley. Kenneth Millar’s review of Ralph L. Curry’s Stephen Leacock: Humorist and Humanist was originally printed in the San Francisco Chronicle of January 3, 1960.

  11 Archer in Jeopary included three novels: The Doomsters, The Zebra-Striped Hearse, and The Instant Enemy.

  12 Jill Krementz.

  13 Yellin’s Lord John Press published Acrobats in a Park in October 1980.

  Chapter Ten

  1 The formality of Ken’s reference to and the mispelling of Yellin in this handwritten letter were likely signs of the writing and memory difficulties besetting him.

  2 William Winter served as governor of Mississippi from 1980–1984 and spearheaded the state’s transformative Education Reform Act of 1982. Leontyne Price, the acclaimed soprano, became one of the first African Americans to sing leading roles at the Metropolitan Opera. Eudora had supported Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) in both his campaigns for president against Dwight D. Eisenhower; she even canvassed for him in New York during the 1950 campaign.

  3 General Mark Clark (1896–1984) was the youngest American three-star general during World War II. As head of the Fifth Army, he was in charge of the invasion of Italy in which Eudora’s friend John Robinson had participated.

  4 Warren’s essay “Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back” appeared in the February 25, 1980, issue of the New Yorker.

  5 Mary Lee Settle, “Welty’s Splendors,” Saturday Review October 1980: 84; Maureen Howard, “A Collection of Discoveries,” New York Times Book Review November 2, 1980, 31; Hortense Calisher, “Eudora Welty: A Life’s Work,” Washington Post Book World October 26, 1980, 2.

  6 Ralph Sipper to Eudora Welty, October 28, 1980, Eudora Welty Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

  7 Herb Yellin to Eudora Welty, March 17, 1981, Eudora Welty Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

  8 Sipper to Welty, June 10, 1981, Eudora Welty Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

  9 Wayne Warga, “The Millars: Tale of Fortitude,” Los Angeles Times, February 11, 1982.

  10 Sipper to Welty, February 25, 1982, Eudora Welty Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

  11 Caroline Heilbrun (1926–2003) was a feminist scholar, whose book Writing a Woman’s Life (1988) would be critical of Eudora’s autobiography One Writer’s Beginnings (1984).

  12 Robertson Davies (1913–1995) was a Canadian novelist, dramatist, critic, and journalist, who taught at the University of Toronto. He was Ken’s long-distance collaborator on a weekly Toronto magazine column Ken wrote while a graduate student at the University of Michigan in 1940 and 1941.

  13 Sipper to Welty, June 1, 1982, Eudora Welty Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

  14 Welty to Price, October 26, [1982], Reynolds Price Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.

  15 Ross Macdonald would be the third recipient of the Robert Kirsch Award, given annually at the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes.This award’s previous recipients were Wallace Stegner and Wright Morris.

  16 Welty, interview with Nolan, 406.

  17 Welty, interview with Nolan, 406.

  18 Ralph Sipper, interview with Nolan, 407; Welty to Aswell, August 4, 1983, Eudora Welty Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

  19 Welty, interview with Nolan, 408.

  20 Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings, 104.

  21 Sipper to Welty, January 26, 1983. A Xerox typescript of this letter is part of the Reynolds Price Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.

  22 Eudora Welty, “Henry, Part I Affinities,” Box 248, Folder 4, Piece 9, Eudora Welty Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

  23 Welty to Aswell, August 4, 1983, Eudora Welty Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

  24 Eudora Welty to William Jay and Sonja Smith, September 19, 1983, William Jay Smith Papers, Washington University Libraries’ Department of Special Collections, St. Louis, MO. This letter, with its memories of Ken, was fittingly enclosed with a Xerox of the copyedited typescript of One Writer’s Beginnings, a book in which Eudora described memory as her “treasure most dearly regarded.”

  25 Welty to Price, July 9, 1984, Reynolds Price Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University; Reynolds Price, A Whole New Life (New York: Atheneum, 1994), 28; Welty to Millar, [November 24, 1977]. Part of this paragraph appears in a slightly different form in Marrs’s Eudora Welty, A Biography, 490.

  Appendix: “Henry”: An Unfinished Story, Editors’ Introduction and Part 1

  1 Welty to Millar, November 29, 1976.

  2 The Eudora Welty Collection at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History holds two sets of manuscripts grouped under the title “Henry.” The more developed one includes a folder Welty labeled “Part 1 Affinities,” a folder she called “Henry” with the added notation “Part 2 Flashback—Insert ‘Affinities,’” a folder she labeled “Spring ’84 Pulled out to be of use in Henry’s story.” (The contents of these original folders have now been divided into multiple archival folders.) A smaller number of fragments, separately filed, are part of a rather different story, perhaps titled “The City of Light,” and are focused on an architect/protagonist named Henry. Eudora evidently worked concurrent
ly on the two stories for a time, continued with the second one after abandoning the first, and eventually destroyed most of the second manuscript. See Eudora Welty to William and Emily Maxwell, June 1, 1985, in What There Is To Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), 399.

  The more extensive and intact version of “Henry,” abridged here, does not exist as a fair copy and includes only one sustained narrative segment, the flashback scene in Part 2. We have included all of the flashback, except for occasional words or lines we could not decipher; these are indicated by bracketed ellipses. The present action of this “Henry” version exists in brief fragments (including bits of dialogue on strips of paper and paragraphs written on grocery receipts, envelopes, or pieces of incoming mail). From the randomly filed fragments of “Part 1 Affinities” and the loosely ordered ones in “Spring ’84,” we have chosen to include passages that, it seems to us, most clearly suggest, complement, or adhere to the plot and characterization found in the flashback. We have excluded fragments that, in our opinion, do not do so as clearly or that duplicate material in selected fragments. We hope our editorial decisions have provided a story text that, because abridged, is both authentic and coherent.

  3 “Affinities,” Box 248, Folder 14, Piece 43, Folder 3, Piece 8.

  4 “Affinities,” Box 249, Folder 1, Piece 56.

  5 “Affinities,” Box 249, Folder 1, Piece 58.

  6 “Affinities,” Box 249, Folder 1, Piece 63.

  7 “Affinities,” Box 249, Folder 1, Piece 60.

  8 “Affinities,” Box 248, Folder 13, Piece 42.

  9 Cuchulain is one of the great heroes of Irish mythology. His father was the sun god Lug, and Cuchulain himself became a great warrior, who at one point single-handedly and successfully defended Ulster from an invading force. There is a reference to Cuchulain the Hound of Ulster in Ross Macdonald’s 1956 Lew Archer novel The Barbarous Coast.

  10 “Affinities,” Box 249, Folder 1, Piece 64.

  Part 2

  1 “Part 2 Flashback” is located in Box 249, Folders 4, 5, 6, 7.